Andreas Ammer, Micha and Markus Acher pay homage to beat poet Bob Kaufman – Munich

When you think of the Beat Generation, the first thing that comes to mind is Jack Kerouac and his original road novel “Unterwegs”, which was as fast-paced as it was wildly successful. Very likely also the bearded Allen Ginsberg and his great lament “Howl” or the crazy cut-up specialist William S. Burroughs and his feverish junkie novel “Naked Lunch”. Which also includes the three heavyweights of a literary counterculture that, in their rejection of the stuffy American catalog of values ​​of the 1950s, in their anti-materialism and their intoxicated striving for transcendence and sexual liberation, already anticipated much of what the hippies would do a decade later propagated. Of course, three heavyweights alone do not make a generation. Rather, today they outshine what made the Beat Generation the Beat Generation, namely a polyphonic, mixed-sounding choir full of talented freaks who have long been largely overshadowed by the big three.

Two years ago, however, some light shone on one of these almost forgotten people. “Thank Bob For Beatniks” was the name of the famous musical radio play (free to listen to in the BR media library), with which the radio play maker Andreas Ammer together with the musicians Markus and Micha Acher von The Notwist (as rumbling jazzy drummers and horns) and Leo Hopfinger alias LeRoy (as sample and loop officer) went on the trail of someone who is said to have coined the word beatnik. Bob Kaufman, born in New Orleans in 1925 as the tenth of 13 children to a Jewish father with German roots and a Catholic mother from Martinique, was nothing less than the epitome of a street poet at his peak in San Francisco in the late 1950s and early 1960s. One who would rather declare his poems, which are characterized by surrealism, spontaneous improvisation and the syncopation of jazz, in the faces of passers-by and bar visitors than write them down. One in which the sparks of association are flying around so wildly that he is considered a kind of forefather of freestyle rap in US hip-hop. And one for whom the possibility of spiritual awakening through poetry seemed to be such a tangible thing that as a “public nuisance” he did not let himself be dissuaded from performing even after dozens of arrests and periods in prison.

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For Andreas Ammer, the poetry of Kaufman, who died in 1986, is “spoken word at it’s best, pure sound”, as he puts it. In the end, the poems didn’t have to be set to music in an interpretative sense, because “they were already completely clay. You notice that in each of the recitations, but especially in Bob’s own readings, which we found after a long search.” In fact, there is a distinctive dancing flow in the rhythm of Kaufman’s lines, which from the radio play “Thank Bob For Beatniks” have now also found their way onto the album “All These Streets I Must Find Cities For”. While on the former they are still poetic mosaic pieces of a narrative search for clues that lead one from the well-trodden tourist paths of present-day San Francisco back to Kaufman in the Beatnik era, they are on the extracted album under the project name the plastic beatniks right in the center of the action.

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In addition to Kaufman’s own brittle voice, there is above all that of the singer and jazz clarinetist Angel Bat Dawis, who makes his surrealistic panoramas glow in “Bagelshop Jazz”, for example, where he immerses himself in the charged nocturnal atmosphere of a popular beatnik meeting place. There’s genre-defying musician and activist Moor Mother, who reveals Kaufman’s political side with “War Memoir” while unfolding an oppressive gloom to driving drums. And there, accompanied by the melancholic sound of a harmonium, is actually the “Godmother of Punk” Patti Smith, who as a lyricist was essentially inspired by the Beat poets and was also on friendly terms with Allen Ginsberg. “Yes I will” she answered spontaneously to an e-mail from Andreas Ammer asking whether she would like to recite “Ginsberg (for Allen)”, a poem for the project that Kaufman once wrote specifically for their mutual friend.

He, in turn, wouldn’t be the charming gay growler Allen Ginsberg if he didn’t return the favor here with a sample from the hereafter at Kaufman for his lyrical appreciation. In “What He Looks Like?”, cobbled together from an interview with Beat chronicler Raimond Foye, he so raves about the young Kaufman as a “beautiful guy” with chiseled features and smooth skin, so “handsome” and “noble looking” , that somewhere in poet’s heaven someone gets really embarrassed.

“All These Streets I Must Find Cities For” will be released April 29 via Morr Music